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Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Obama's War In Iraq & Afghanistan: Its Historical Roots

Some of the Democratic Party-oriented leaders of the U.S. anti-war movement have been claiming since 2006 that the election of a Democratic Party-controlled U.S. Congress and a Democratic President would end the U.S. War Machine’s immoral military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet the Democratic Obama Administration has still not ordered the U.S. War Machine to immediately start withdrawing all Pentagon troops and U.S. private contractor troops from Iraq and Afghanistan by February 1, 2009.

One reason may be because it was a Democratic Administration, the Carter Administration, which initiated a covert war against people in Afghanistan in the late 1970s; and it was a Democratic Administration, the administration of Obama Administration Secretary of State-Designate Clinton’s husband, which continued the Bush I Administration’s war on the Iraqi people during the 1990s.

For more information on some of the historical roots of Obama’s War In Iraq & Afghanistan, you might want to check out the following items that first appeared in the now-defunct alternative newsweekly Downtown in the 1990s:

Another Kuwaitigate War To Eliminate Saddam?

When Bill “Bush” Clinton ordered 23 cruise missiles to be fired on Baghdad in June 1993, the pretext he used was an alleged Iraqi “plot” to assassinate former CIA Director Bush, which the government of Kuwait Inc. claimed it had discovered. Yet, as Seymour Hersh noted in New Yorker magazine (11/1/93) “a classified CIA study…was highly skeptical of the Kuwaiti claims of an Iraqi assassination attempt” and “the study prepared by the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, suggested that Kuwait might have `cooked the books’ on the alleged plot in an effort to play up the `continuing Iraqi threat’ to Western interests in the Persian Gulf.”

Hersh also revealed that the Clinton White House’s National Security Council Division of Near East and South Asian Affairs Director, Martin Indyk, strongly pressured Clinton to bomb Baghdad and that, before moving into his White House office, Indyk was the executive director of the AIPAC Zionist lobby-sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy. At a 1991 Aspen Strategy Group Workshop, Indyk argued that “the United States…can undertake a more ambitious effort to bring the Middle East into the New World Order” and “the approach…would require the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Baghdad.”

The U.S. Military-Industrial-Media Complex has apparently been seeking to eliminate the Iraqi leader since 1990. As former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark noted in The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes In The Gulf:

“…The press reported Pentagon sources saying Bush had ordered General Powell to target Saddam Hussein for assassination shortly after Aug. 2 (1990). We now know that an attempt to carry out this order was made by dropping `super’ bombs on a command shelter in February 1991, and we may never know what other efforts were made. Of course, the assassination of a foreign head of state, even in time of war, is prohibited by laws. Article 23 of the Hague Regulations, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes Against Internationally Protected Persons, and even U.S. Presidential Executive Order 12333 prohibit assassinations…”

(Downtown 11/9/94)

Did 1991 U.S. Bombing Of Iraq Kill 50,000 Civilians?

As former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark recalled in The Fire This Time: U.S.War Crimes In The Gulf, “When the Pentagon issued its three-volume report on the Gulf War in April 1992…it never discussed civilian casualties” and “The `watch-dog’ U.S. media never criticized this outrageous omission, and never raised the issue of civilian deaths.” Yet, according to Clark, “more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians died during the bombing” and ‘in early 1992, it was widely reported that 5,000-6,000 civilians were dying every month as a direct result of the bombing compounded by shortages of food, medicine, and medical services caused by the sanctions…”

In his 1992 book, Clark also noted the following:

“Right now the Pentagon knows exactly what it did in Iraq. It has film of much of the assault. The media knows this, yet does not demand this vital information.

“U.S. claims that it spared civilians through pinpoint bombing are false. There is no way to bomb directly populated cities day after day and not kill civilians.

“The whole of Basra was bombed mercilessly.

“In fact, 800,000 people lived in Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. When I was there, during and after the bombing, I saw whole neighborhoods—schools, homes, a post office—destroyed…”